Category: Education

A report released today from the Pew Charitable Trusts sheds new light on

what has long been true but is often overlooked: local jails play a vital role in our nation’s health care safety net, working often as the default response to people with mental health and substance use disorders. Individuals passing through jails have high rates of chronic and infectious diseases as well as disproportionately high rates of mental health and substance use disorders compared to the general

population. Even so, jails are often ill-equipped to respond to the health

The 8th annual Beyond the Bars Conference of the Center for Justice at Columbia University seeks to contribute to the growing movement to close jails and prisons as a part of the larger struggle to end mass incarceration. In particular, we will focus on elevating the efforts led by grassroots organizers that include formerly incarcerated and directly impacted people.

Prison and jail closings have been taking place unevenly throughout the United States over the past decade. However, campaigns like the ones in New York, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee have helped to usher in a new phase, one that highlights the role of grassroots organizing and directly impacted leadership, and that has begun to put forth a more transformative vision of how to close jails and prisons and what comes in their place. Momentum for lasting change is building. Organizers, activists and scholars have been grappling with many of the deeply seeded issues related to incarceration and criminalization. From the movement to close youth prisons entirely, to centering the fight for racial justice, to highlighting the ways that women and lgbtq community are impacted, to focusing on the elderly inside prisons with long sentences that are about punishment not safety, to interrogating the effectiveness of punishment in reducing violence, we are at a moment where we are able to make concrete advances in reducing the carceral footprint.

It is our hope that this conference will bolster these efforts in the following ways:

Convene and support a national network of people and organizations working to close jails and prisons across the country
Help articulate a vision and analysis for closing jails and prisons and what comes in its place
Address and examine some of the difficult issues and questions that arise in the efforts to close jails and prison
Further catalyze university involvement in the struggle to end mass incarceration

Recent years have seen a rush towards evidence-based tools in criminal justice. As part of this movement, many jurisdictions have adopted actuarial risk assessment to supplement or replace the ad-hoc decisions of judges. Proponents of risk assessment tools claim that they can dramatically reduce incarceration without harming public safety. Using rich data on more than one million criminal cases, the paper shows that a 2011 law making risk assessment a mandatory part of the bail decision led to a significant change in bail setting practice, but only a small increase in pretrial release.